Metaphorically Speaking – Sonnet 73 Essays

In the first quatrain, the speaker contrasts his age is like a "time of year,": late autumn, when the "yellow leaves" have almost completely fallen from the trees and the boughs "shake against the cold." Those metaphors clearly indicate that winter, which usually symbolizes the loneliness and desolation, is coming. Here the reader would easily observe the similarity between the season and the speaker's age. Since winter is usually

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (“Sonnet 18”) is one of Shakespeare’s most famous poems. It is the model English, or Shakespearean sonnet: it contains three quatrains and a finishing couplet.. The poem follows the traditional English sonnet form by having the octet introduce an idea or set up the poem, and the sestet beginning with a volta, or turn in perspective. In the octet of Sonnet 18, Shakespeare poses the question “Shall I compare the to a summer’s day” and basically begins to describe all the bad qualities of summer. He says it’s too windy, too short, too hot, and too cloudy. Eventually fall is going to come and take away all the beauty because of the changes nature brings. In the sestet, however, his tone changes as he begins to talk about his beloved’s “eternal summer” (Shakespeare line 9). This is where the turn takes place in the poem. Unlike the summer, their beauty will never fade. Not even death can stop their beauty for, according to Shakespeare, as long as people can read this poem, his lover’s beauty will continue to live. Shakespeare believes that his art is more powerful than any season and that in it beauty can be permanent.

Naturally, Shakespeare’s very first Sonnet deals with themes of procreation and immortality, literally and figuratively birthing his series of Sonnets. Ideas of Genesis, or the creation of the world, show strong traces throughout the poem and serve as the piece’s main focus according to literary critic Helen Vendler. The sonnet also deals with the logistics of beauty; we want the most beautiful people to have children, so their beauty will be preserved forever—when the parent dies, the child they leave behind will remind us of their own beauty. Shakespeare utilizes metaphors in his language to help promote this idea, for example the image of a bud, growing until it inevitably dies and diminishes. Unlike flowers, Shakespeare tells us here that we humans have the opportunity to keep this beauty everlasting. The very beginning of Shakespeare’s infamous series of sonnets, Sonnet 1 celebrates the beauty of procreation and offers a plea for humanity centered around our duty as humans to procreate and let our legacies live on, so our spirits can live vicariously through generations of our children.

In the first quatrain, Shakespeare begins his meditation on the process of decay. He begins the poem with "I", which signals that Shakespeare will later give his own experience and account. The first object presented in this sonnet is a clock, which is to set the mood of the poem.

   Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare is widely read and studied. But what is Shakespeare  trying to say? Though it seems there will not be a simple answer, for a better understanding of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, this essay offers an explication of the sonnet from The Norton Anthology of English Literature:

What is love? Love is the way you feel towards someone. In this case the poets William Shakespeare and Edna Millay talk about love in their own manner. In Shakespeare’s poem he compares the beauty of summer”s day to the beauty of a women. Edna Millay explains how love is not perfect and not to give up love for anything else. The two poets are illustrating a theme of love within the literary similarties and differences of the two poems.

A poem is a piece of writing that partakes of the nature of both speech and song that is nearly always rhythmical, usually metaphorical, and that often exhibits such formal elements as meter, rhyme, and stanza structure. In her poem, “Variations of the Word ‘“love”’,” Margaret Atwood introduces to her audience the word “love” from many different perspectives. Google defines “love” as “an intense feeling of deep affection”, or “having a deep feeling or sexual attachment to (someone).” But “love” is not something that can easily be described. Atwood goes on to present and portray the word through different illustrations, beginning with cliché examples and ending with her own personal scenarios. The author’s tone and metaphorical language effectively conveys her perspective of “love”.

Opposite to the use of the dark to indicate death, Thomas uses light to portray life. For example, when speaking of the types of men he describes their lives to be full of light, in the case of the wise man: “lightening”, the good men “how bright”, the wild men “sing the sun in flight” and, finally, the afore mentioned grave men could “blaze like meteors”. Shakespeare similarly uses “out, out brief candle” in Macbeth and in Othello when Othello himself says “put out the light, then put out the light” where both “candle” and “light” refer to life. Moreover, the metaphors are a type of imagery as they paint the appearance of something bright and illuminated, symbolising the importance and vitality of life. Overall, the use of metaphors and symbolism

In this sonnet, Shakespeare uses metaphor to create a vivid image in the reader's mind of the passage of time, old age, and death by describing the Fall season, the end of a day, and the burning out of a flame.

One of William Shakespeare's tools from his choices of words was figurative diction since most words used to describe the narrator’s mistress were based in comparing her to other objects. For example, the poem starts with the narrator using the words “eyes”, “like”, “nothing”, and “sun”. The narrator introduces an example of a simile from the figurative choice of words since the word “like” is been used to compare her to something else. In this case he's comparing the sun’s brightness to the dull light of his mistress's eyes and the eyes are important because they are the door to the soul. Then in line 2 from Sonnet 130, the narrator says that the color of the coral outcast more “her lip’s red”. This is an example of a metaphor since the narrator

William Shakespeare, an English playwright and poet, is perhaps the most famous writer in the English language. One of his poems, Sonnet 130, is a parody of typical Petrarchan love poetry in which Petrarch often wrote about an idealized woman he loved and worshipped. In Shakespeare’s sonnet, he makes fun of the idea that a woman can be so perfect and so amazing by describing his mistress as a completely average person. This makes the Petrarchan love poems seem silly and false because, as Shakespeare seems to suggest, no one is that perfect and amazing, including Shakespeare’s “mistress”. The last lines of the poem make clear that Shakespeare did not approve of these high, unreasonable standards of the time. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 begins with Shakespeare intentionally comparing his mistress to the unreasonable, exaggerated

Furthermore Shakespeare compares “The Last Age” to childishness and oblivion meaning that after you have gone through all the stages everything you have built up demolishes and you start back at the first stage. The last line of the poem helps you to determine how the play ends and because this comparison is made it makes you aware of people in your life that have gone through a few of the stages described by Shakespeare. Giving you the idea that the stages may occur in your life but in the end it really doesn’t matter what you have done, because it will most likely be destroyed. The idea that what you have developed will be demolished makes you wonder what you are doing and have done with your life.

     The sonnet, being one of the most traditional and recognized forms of poetry, has been used and altered in many time periods by writers to convey different messages to the audience. The strict constraints of the form have often been used to parallel the subject in the poem. Many times, the first three quatrains introduce the subject and build on one another, showing progression in the poem. The final couplet brings closure to the poem by bringing the main ideas together. On other occasions, the couplet makes a statement of irony or refutes the main idea with a counter statement. It leaves the reader with a last impression of what the author is trying to say.

William Shakespeare's sonnet cycle is famous with its rich metaphorical style.  The depth of each sonnet comes from its multilayered meanings and images, which are reinforced by its structure, sound, and rhythm.  Sonnet #73 provides an excellent example.  This sonnet shows the speaker's agony over human mortality and, moreover, his/her way of coping with it in an effective way.  The speaker, especially in terms of his cognizance of time, experiences dramatic changes in two ways: (1) from time measured by quantity to time as quality,  (2) from cyclical time to a linear one.  These changes, manifested by a set of images (autumn, twilight, glowing), enable him/her to embrace

Shakespeare uses two powerful metaphors in line five and in line six to compare the summer's imperfections to the perfection of the beloved. In line five he uses a metaphor "Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines" to describe that in the summer the sun gets to hot and this is yet another imperfection of a summer day which the beloved is superior to. Although some may compare there beloveds eyes with the glow or beauty of "the eye of heaven" here the speaker has chosen to claim the opposite saying that the sun is inferior to his beloved in that her eyes are more beautiful. In line six of the poem the idea of the sun being imperfect is further enhanced by phrase "gold complexion dimmed" this is implying that the sun is imperfect in that it is not always hot enough. Here the speaker implies that the beloved is flawless in that her complexion is never changed, remaining "gold" like. Nature that surrounds us is beautiful, the trees, ocean, and the wild life, and although the speaker makes a point to disfigure the view of nature the intention of the poet is to reinforce the beauty of the beloved.